flatten

Verb

WordNet 3.0

Verb (3)

make flat or flatter“flatten a road”“flatten your stomach with these exercises”
become flat or flatter“The landscape flattened”Synonyms: flatten out
lower the pitch of (musical notes)Synonyms: drop

Webster's Dictionary (GCIDE)

Flatten \Flat"ten\, v. i. To become or grow flat, even, depressed, dull, vapid, spiritless, or depressed below pitch. [1913 Webster]

Flatten \Flat"ten\ (fl[a^]t"t'n), v. t. [imp. & p. p. Flattened; p. pr. & vb. n. Flattening.] [From Flat, a.]

1.To reduce to an even surface or one approaching evenness; to make flat; to level; to make plane. [1913 Webster]

2.To throw down; to bring to the ground; to prostrate; hence, to depress; to deject; to dispirit. [1913 Webster]

3.To make vapid or insipid; to render stale. [1913 Webster]

4.(Mus.) To lower the pitch of; to cause to sound less sharp; to let fall from the pitch. [1913 Webster]

To flatten a sail (Naut.), to set it more nearly fore-and-aft of the vessel.

Flattening oven, in glass making, a heated chamber in which split glass cylinders are flattened for window glass. [1913 Webster]

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing

flatten

To remove structural information, especially to filter something with an implicit tree structure into a simple sequence of leaves; also tends to imply mapping to flat ASCII. "This code flattens an expression with parentheses into an equivalent canonical form." [Jargon File]

The Jargon File

flatten vt.

[common] To remove structural information, esp. to filter something with an implicit tree structure into a simple sequence of leaves; also tends to imply mapping to flat-ASCII. “This code flattens an expression with parentheses into an equivalent canonical form.”